The name enGAGE reminds us that church is not that meeting that takes place on a Sunday but it is a body of believers and the four focus points of enGAGE are to:

Engage with God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit
Engage with the Bible – reading, knowing and doing
Engage with each other – the community of believers, building and living in authentic relationship with each other
Engage with society – people outside of the church, showing them God’s love and grace and pointing them to Him.

American spelling of gauge…as in to measure…so the name reminds us that “we are constantly needing to Gauge/measure where we are in life compared to where we should be and continually trying to narrow that gap”…we should constantly be measuring ourselves against Joshua Davidson, cos as his followers we are supposed to be trying to be more and more like him daily. “This is a journey we are on, together in community”.

(quotations from website).

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what sets us apart?
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the “broken, but beautiful bride”

Brett loves the saying “Jesus is coming back for his bride, not a harem”. There is no such thing as Churches, it’s all one Church. Anyway, he’s really passionate about bringing together the bride…and he’s somehow managed to rub off that passion on to our congregation. We are all about bringing together the whole church, not just our denomination. We love doing the stuff with other congregations in Stell/Cape Town/Somer Set West…like worship events and camps and stuff like that where we bring together the whole church and just celebrate and rejoice and be the bride together.

We have come across opposition of course, as Jon Acuff said, “only ordinary things ever get full consensus from people. Doing something extraordinary should never make complete sense to everyone in your life”, but we are slowly building bridges, maybe not as the congregation per se, but as individuals from our congregation who see the need to fellowship with other followers outside our little circle…the church is being A Church!

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one of the dudes from our church once said that the thing that sets us apart is that we are the “earthy church”…meaning we are down-to-earth. Vineyard (the international denomination one) has a thing against titles…i mean we have pastors and leadership people but we don’t have titles for them like deacons and bishops etc…we are all members of the church and each member is called to take part and minister and lead and stuff.

for instance we encourage people to share verses or messages or whatever that they feel God is laying on their hearts during worship or whatever and as Brett often says, we are all part of the priesthood so therefore we should all be praying for each other, laying hands on each other, baptising each other, ministering to each other, etc.

In fact, during the preaches there’s often inside jokes and back-chatting and adding on and questionning and aswering each other…interesting services I tell you.

we are also very much about being real…like really real…like confess your sins to each other real…from the pulpit if you feel it’s necessary (and by pulpit I mean the stool that Brett sits on during the preach…hee hee). We hang out together a lot…like outside of church…so it goes without saying that we will turn to each other for accountability and prayer and holding-each-other-up-ness, so it’s very important that we are real with each other and talk to each other and share real stuff.

we believe Christ calls you as you are…not a fake, seemingly perfect version of you…but the raw, broken, failed you. Come to the cross broken – no dressing up, no band-aids – he can’t heal you if you pretend you don’t need healing.

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why i love my church
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we believe in prayer
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there’s been a couple of times where i’ve been in the car with friends and someone tells us of a need or prayer request or whatever and we just pull the car off to the side and pray for them and minister to them right there and then.

one of my youth peoples got stabbed this past week and he came through to church on sunday evening so at the end of the service a bunch of us gathered around him to pray for healing

we believe in living out the stuff
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a friend was telling us of financial troubles and another friend said “well we’ll keep you in prayer, but in the meantime is there anything we can help with practically right now?”

we read a book in our cell about getting out of the pews and actually doing stuff which led to things like starting up “kinetic love” – an outreach group which also started up the 24-7 prayer room – and selling of hotdogs to the homeless…

we are a super funny bunch of crazies
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some of my favorite enGAGE quotes:

“i don’t want to be controlled by my scarves”

“shut up christian and go read your bible”

“every time i have a conversation with a girl i think she’s either going to laugh or fall in love with me”

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one last thing for those who live in Stellies
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wednesday nights 9:30 pm we meet in the prayer room (Neelsie, room T-29 i think, 4th floor in between the loos and TBT and across from the habitat for humanity Shack) and we have a time of prayer then we go out onto the streets and talk to/pray for/minister to people we meet. Great time of kingdom-come type stuff…please join us if you can/want to.

speaking of prayer room…for those who haven’t been there…it’s a room dedicated to 24-7 prayer…it’s open all the time and you can just pop in there and say a prayer if you wanted to.

I attended a wedding this past weekend and wow…beautiful!!! Brett “Fish” Anderson, my pastor, was getting married to “The Beautiful” Valerie and she looked even more beautiful than usual. The whole wedding was o-m-g!

top 3 moments of the wedding:
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coming in 3rd:
instead of the dum dum da da dum song when the bride comes in they had a drum beat thing going…there were like 20 people scattered throughout the audience with djembe drums and they were all beating the same rhythm as she walked in

2nd place goes to:
the worship session…like you know how at Christian weddings they usually have that awkward 2 worship song deal and no one’s really worshipping and it’s all awkward and you don’t really know what to do…at this wedding they had a full on 30 minute worship session…so awesome!

and the winner:
Val’s face as Brett was reading the vows to her. she looked so beautiful at that moment…there was soooo much love in her face…

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Another thing I really liked about this wedding was that it was so Brett and Val…and I don’t mean that the focus was on them (which it obviously was), I mean it was so representative of their characters. For instance, Val’s dress had black lining in it…never seen a wedding dress with black before, and that was representative of how she always stands out and does her own thing and how’s she’s uniquely Val…and brett’s hair was purple (yes, really)…and their vows, oh my gosh…it was just so them…not like a cookie-cutter wedding (not that I’m saying the other weddings I’ve been to were).

Oh yes, and they had those japanese game show things (youtube them…get it, instead of google them…anyway) playing on the big screen in the background while we were waiting for the ceremony to start…funny!

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other highlights:

Brett’s speech at the reception was so long, he went into preaching mode and it took 50 minutes for just his speech…but everything they both said was beautiful and true and all good stuffs. Brett’s spreach (speech + preach) included a message to the singles in the room, then some advice for the marrieds as well and it was really cool…nothing new, but great reminders.

The food was really good and there was dancing afterwards which was fun! Love dancing with enGAGE peeps, they are so much fun on the dance floor.

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The reason I think I might have enjoyed this wedding more than others is because it was the first wedding I went to where I fully grasped the meaning of marriage…or maybe not fully, but you get what I’m saying I hope. Like, it’s the first time where I understood the big picture…you know, the whole earthly marriage being a picture of our relationship with God (us being Joshua Davidson’s bride). And to be honest, I’ve never been big on weddings (just the wedding, not marriage)…I didn’t actually want a wedding cos I didn’t see the significance, but having been there to witness Brett and Val exchanging their vows and publicly declaring their love and intentionality towards each other made me see weddings a bit differently.

So all in all, a great wedding…and hopefully (prayerfully) someday mine will be too.